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[EDITOR'S NOTE: A local tempest in Mr. Coffee Pot occurred when the outgoing president carelessly said that one of the campuses was like something out of the 1950s when she arrived four years earlier. A former campus president resented the assessment, and this writer gave a faculty perspective.]

I desperately need to hear Tex Ritter singing while I write this piece. I already hear the refrain, "Looking for a home," from the Boll Weevil song, but I need to hear Tex singing about looking for a word or phrase . . . without creating a redundancy or an anachronism. And it's all the fault of the French, of course.

DONALD TRUMP COMES IN first again, not surprisingly. He was ahead of the pack in the competition for the World’s Stupidest National Leader. He has even received the endorsements of the American Bozo Board, the North American Society of Inanely Stupid Whackos, and the Mortimer Snerd Foundation for the Clueless and Incompetent.

. When I was a young political wonk immersing myself in The Making of a President and similar books, it occurred to me that the U.S. needed a variation on what some European countries had: a president (who was a ribbon-cutter and meeter-and-greeter for ceremonies of state) and a prime minister (who ran the shooting match with his/her cabinet).

.Politics very much aside, folks need to decide what the top priorities are for Americans. A sane health system belongs on the list, but it’s not the top priority for some regions. What is? Let’s look at what is causing American homes, businesses, and families to suffer the most.

Let’s explore what you know about the Civil War. So much of the fall-out from the war is in the news today as we focus our energies on proposals to remove Confederate monuments and even the Jefferson Memorial (because he was a slave-owner). The latter, of course, means that we should also remove the Washington Monument and various tributes to James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew J...

Unfortunately, we Americans have never had much of a sense of history. We knock down buildings that have been around a little too long for our taste (which is minimal). We erect new buildings that have all the design aestheticism of airport terminals.

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This slapdash approach to life carries over into our sense of history, and, as the ...